The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,8

on the flattened corner of his cheekbone.

"Well, if they could hold him as their prisoner," Gil snapped, "they sure as hell won't have any problems killing you ."

An echo of that wild lightness still lingered in his eyes. "They'll have to catch me first."

Gil looked across the flickering fountain of light at him for a moment, struggling with anger and caring. Then she sighed, disarmed. "Well, all I've got to say is, you have the flakiest way of hiding out from them that I've ever seen, but that isn't any of my business."

" Ah." Ingold smiled regretfully. "But it is your business, Gil. I have rather effectively made it your business, by bringing you to this world against your will and by getting you trapped here."

Gil shook her head. "That wasn't your fault. You couldn't have known the Dark Ones would try to get through the gap in the Void."

"It's kind of you to say so. But I should have reasoned it out earlier than I did." Amid the darkness of the wall, his huge shadow stooped forward like a giant as he took her hand and drew her to his side. "I knew of the possibility. But at the time I rescued Prince Tir, flight into your world seemed to be my only recourse, and I needed a confederate on the other side of the Void. And believe me, it has been a grim lesson to me about the inadvisability of tampering with worlds beyond my own."

Oil shrugged. "If you hadn't tampered, Rudy would still be painting bikes for the Hell's Angels. You can't say that was just coincidence."

"I don't believe that there is such a thing as coincidence," Ingold said, and for a moment their eyes met. "And in any case," he went on, "if I had not tampered, you would not have been dragged from the life you were working to build for yourself at the university, your research, and your friends. If it had not been for the danger that the Dark could follow you back across the Void and devastate your world as it has destroyed ours, you would have returned to all that long ago. And that, my dear," he concluded quietly, "is why I came here tonight." He drew her forward. Light pulsed suddenly in the crystal inset in the table's center, bathing them in a white kaleidoscope of brightness. "Look into the crystal, Gil."

She obeyed him, bending over it and blinking against that coruscating glare. "I- I don't understand," she stammered.

The brightness drew her sight, blinding her to the room, the shadows, and the robed figure at her side. Though there was a silence, she felt as if she were looking at music; only the faint buzzing throb of the machinery in the nearby pump rooms broke the utter stillness of the vision in which she was caught.

"It is- not easy to explain," that deep, grainy voice at her side said. "This observation chamber, like the one up on the second level, was originally built to monitor the defenses of the Keep-a logical expedient, considering the miles of corridor involved. But, as Rudy learned, magic crystals have many uses. What you are seeing now is a construct, a simple visible expression of ideas too vast to be comprehended by ordinary means."

Gil frowned, as her eyes slowly adjusted to the brilliance of that river of light that seemed to pour up around her.

For a time she was not certain that she even saw what she thought she saw, for she had no consciousness of the crystal itself. She thought that she looked down through an infinity of space, bathed in burning whiteness, and that, like bubbles in shining solution, gold spheres were moving, circling one another in the slow patterns of an unknowable dance. Their opalescent surfaces swam with colors that she neither recognized nor comprehended, revealing stars, galaxies, ages- cosmic vistas of something that was neither space nor time. The spheres grew infinitely smaller with distance, though there was neither horizon nor wall to break her line of sight; as far as she could see in that blazing ether, they were moving, merging, parting, and drifting around one another in endless patterns whose meaning whispered at the verges of her understanding. They shimmered like oiled gold as they touched, pressed together like the hands of joining dancers in those veils of light, and then, with infinite slowness, parted.

Ingold spoke again, his words seeming to her to come from some great distance. "What